Products sold to customers are often sent through a series of intermediate points between the original source, such as a manufacturer, and the customers, who may buy the products from a retailer. Products may include food items, pharmaceutical drugs or other products, including products of manufacture. These products may be sold to a customer through a grocery store, a pharmacy, a department store or other type of retailer.
Products may be stored in the supply chain to the customer at any number of different points. Some of the products may need to be stored in specific warehouses depending on the type of product. If many products are shipped together, it may become difficult to determine if the correct products and the correct number of products have been provided to the correct entities in the supply chain. For example, it may be important for providers and/or receivers of milk to know whether a certain amount of milk has been delivered to a specific milk warehouse.
This product shipment information may be provided manually by the deliverer or receiver by writing or entering the information into some type of data entry device. However, the manual entry of information is prone to error that can be costly. For example, a data entry error may result in a shipment of perishable goods being sent to a wrong location, and the entire shipment may go bad.
The product shipment information may also be obtained by scanning products with a bar code scanner. For example, a bar code scanner is used to scan products loaded into a truck on a pallet. This type of system may minimize data enrty errors, but many times pallets are loaded and unloaded on the truck to make room for other shipments being loaded on the truck. Sometimes pallets unintentionally get left behind, and the bar code scanner system typically is unable to determine whether all the shipments that are supposed to be on the truck are on the truck.